-w/ no War of 1812, Uncle Sam never becomes a thing, and Brother Jonathan remains America's mascot
-jitney is word for nickel
-expressions (from Made in America Bryson)
-In addition, there were scores more that have since fallen out of use: ground and lofty (once a very common synonym for fine and dandy), happify, to missionate, to consociate (that is, to come together in an assembly), dunderment (bewilderment), puckerstoppled (to be embarrassed), from Dan to Beersheba. This last, alluding to the northernmost and southernmost outposts of the Holy Land, was in daily use for at least two hundred years as a synonym for wide-ranging, from A to Z, but dropped from view in the nineteenth century and hasn’t been seen much since.
-The lexical creations of cowboys, miners and other western Americans become incidental when compared with the legacy of Spanish terms from the West. These at one time numbered well over a hundred. Among the more notable survivors we find lasso (1819), sombrero (1823), patio (1827), corral (1829), lariat (from la reata, ’the rope’, 1831), canyon (1834), plaza (1836), burro, stampede and rodeo (1844), bonanza (1844), bronco and pronto (1850), alfalfa (1855), cinch (from cincha, a saddle girth; 1859), pinto (1860) and vigilante (1865). 32
-Often these words had to be wrestled into shape. Wrangler comes from caballerangero. Vamos became vamoose and then mosey. Vaquero, literally ‘cow handler’, went through any number of variations – buckhara, bakkarer, backayro, buccahro – before finally settling into English as buckaroo. The ten-gallon hat is named not for its capacity to hold liquids (it would have to be the size of a bath-tub for that) but for the braid with which it was decorated; the Spanish for braid is galón.
-mugging (an Americanism dating from 1863; also sometimes called yoking)
-Morse was knocked from the pantheon by an invention more useful and lasting, and far more ingenious, than the telegraph. I refer to the telephone, invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 (and not strictly an American invention since Bell, a native of Edinburgh, Scotland, didn’t become a US citizen until six years later). Bell did not coin the term telephone. The word had been around since the 1830s, and had been applied to a number of devices designed to produce noise, from a kind of musical instrument to a particularly loud foghorn. Bell described his appliance on the patent application as a new kind of ‘telegraphy’ and soon afterwards began referring to it as an ‘electrical speaking telephone’. Others commonly referred to it in its early days as a ‘speaking telegraph’. Bell had become interested in the possibility of long-distance speech through his work with the deaf (a misfortune that extended to both his wife and mother). He was just twenty-eight and his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, just twenty-one, when they made their breakthrough on 10 March 1876. Despite their long and close association, there was a formality in their relationship that was somehow touching. It is notable that Bell’s first telephonic communication was not Tom, come here, I want you,’ but ‘Mr Watson, come here, I want you.’
-The Irish came in their millions, but supplied only a handful of words, notably smithereens, lallapalooza, speakeasy, hooligan (from Gaelic uallachán, a braggart 20 ) and slew (Gaelic sluagh), plus one or two semantic nuances, notably a more casual approach to the distinctions between shall and will, and the habit of attaching definite articles to conditions that previously lacked them, so that whereas a Briton might go into hospital with flu or measles, Americans go to the hospital and suffer from the flu and the measles.
-Only by merest chance do Americans call this central component of their lives an automobile. Scores of other names were tried and discarded before automobile hauled itself to the top of the linguistic heap. Among the other names for the early car were self-motor, locomotive car, autobat, autopher, diamote, autovic, self-propelled carriage, locomotor, horseless carriage, motor buggy, stink chariot (presumably coined by a non-enthusiast), and the simple, no-nonsense machine, which for a long time looked like becoming the generic term for a self-propelled vehicle.
-As motorists required frequent infusions of food, so they also needed a place to sleep from time to time. Throughout the late 1910s and early 1920s cabin camps or tourist courts – freestanding wooden huts, usually ranged in a semicircle and often given affectionately illiterate names like U Like Um Cabins, Kozy Kourt and Para Dice 39 – began to appear on the landscape until by 1925 there were some two thousand of them, generally charging $2 to $3 a night, a price with which downtown hotels couldn’t compete. Variations on cabin camp and tourist court began to appear – tourist camps, motor courts, even at least one autel – but the first place to style itself a motel was the Milestone Motel, on Route 101 in San Luis Obispo, California, which opened its doors on 12 December 1925. (It is still in business, though operating now as the Motel Inn.) The term itself first appeared a few months earlier in Hotel Monthly magazine, in the same article in which motor hotel made its debut. 40 By the 1940s, motel had largely driven out the older court and camp almost everywhere.
-Only recently had Americans become generally acquainted with an appliance that had been around in Europe for some time: the fork. Before that, diners in the New World got by with knives (which often had two prongs on the end for spearing meat) and spoons. Because they were accustomed to using the right hand for both cutting food and raising it to the mouth, they developed the habit – curious to the rest of the world – of transferring the fork from left hand to right between actions. 5 But even as late as the mid-1840s, many Americans were still struggling with the concept, as The Art of Good Behavior, a best-selling etiquette guide of the day, tacitly acknowledged when it cautioned: ‘If possible, the knife should never be put in the mouth at all.’
-Motion pictures of a type had been around since the late eighteenth century. Usually they involved cut-out silhouettes, pictures painted on discs or cylinders or some other such simple device, which could be back-lit and spun to throw a moving image on to a wall or screen. Despite their primitiveness these early devices went by a variety of scientifically impressive names: the phenakistoscope, the animatoscope, the thaumatrope, the phantascope, the stroboscope. Inspired by their linguistic inventiveness, Muybridge constructed a projector of his own and called it a zoopraxiscope. Soon other similar devices were flooding the market: the mutascope, the kinematoscope, the kinematograph, the theatrograph.
-Gradually faro was displaced by poker. Dispute surrounds the origins of the name. The most plausible guess is that it comes from a similar German game called Pochspiel, in which players who passed would call, ‘Poche’, pronounced ‘polka’. 15 Others have suggested that it may have some hazy connection to poke or puck (an English dialectal word meaning to strike, whence the name of the hard black disc used in ice hockey) or to the Norse-Danish pokker, ‘devil’, from which comes the Puck of English folklore. At all events, poker is an Americanism first recorded in 1848. In its very early days the game was also commonly referred to as poko or poka
-Much the same happened with the bicycle. Before an Englishman named J. I. Stassen coined the term bicycle in 1869, two-wheeled vehicles had gone by a variety of names: velocipedes, dandy horses, draisines and boneshakers.
-Batters were at first also known as strikers, and after 1856 as batsmen. The catcher – sometimes called a catcher-out – stood up to fifty feet behind home plate and would remain cautiously out of range of foul tips until the development of the catcher’s mask in the 1890s. The umpire, a term first noted in a baseball context in 1856, also stood (or often sat) safely out of the way along the first base line. In those days the umpire’s judgement was trusted even less than now. Important matches also had a referee, whose job was simply to judge the umpire. (Umpire, incidentally, is one of those many words in which an initial n became attached, like a charged particle, to the preceding indefinite article. In Middle English, one was ‘a noumpere’, just as an apron was at first ‘a napron’.)